Monday, April 7, 2014

It took me a while, but I've finally got around to some info Finance Minister Charles Sousa gave about Ontario's budgets. The media reported the fact the 2013-2014 budget that just finished is coming in at $400 million under the original $11.7 billion prediction. However there's some caveats with this. For the first time ever, the ministry added a reserve of $1 billion to the deficit prediction (similar to the feds). So the actual deficit prediction was $10.7 billion, so coming in at $11.3 billion isn't actually good in my opinion and means either the revenue or expenses were off.
Less reported was that the revenue prediction for 2014-2015 was going to be off by $3.5 billion. Originally the prediction was $120.5 billion, so being off $3.5 billion isn't good and can't be good for the 2014-2015 deficit. It was predicted at at 8.9 billion with a 1.2 billion reserve to get 10.1 billion. So revenue will hurt it and I'm wondering if there will be problems with program expenses as well.